Oh dear. Only 8.5 days until I take boards…and I’m about a billion hours behind on my study plan. But all I can do is my best, so here goes. BRING IT ON BOARDS!!

My lovely class at our Spring Banquet in our new white coats with our names embroidered (one of the perks of being in Lafayette!)

Well it’s been a rough 3 week long finals week…not sure how that works out but I’m so glad our tests were split up!! So far we’ve had pharmacology, genetics and pathology was today. Medicine is on Monday and then JUST TWO WEEKS until boards. I’m getting secretly terrified, but I’m forcing myself to stay calm and enjoy the last few weeks with my classmates. I’ve been so focused on finals and boards that I haven’t even realized that we’ve had our last lecture together, our last finals week together, our last Tuesday lunchtime scrabble game together (which Nimisha and I won!) and all kinds of other lasts. I’ve been at Purdue for four years now, and I’m excited to start somewhere new, but it’s going to be hard leaving my favorite places behind. There is nowhere else in the world that has a Harry’s Chocolate Shop, Silver Dipper ice cream and Neon Cactus within two blocks of each other. And all those basketball games at Mackey Arena? Priceless. Fountain runs and Wednesday pick-up soccer? Fantastic. Five intramural teams a semester? Best study break ever. But now I get to trade all of that in for seeing patients, learning how to do everything and living in Indy!! Every big change in life has its ups and downs, so I will continue to stay calm and get everything I can out of my last few weeks here =)

Cool things: our classrooms are in Lynn Hall, the veterinary building here on campus, and each year they have a skit night where students make jokes about each other, professors, classes, crazy hours and whatnot, and a few of my classmates made a video to share our point of view from down in the sub-basement. Enjoy!!

The Illegitimate Children of Lynn Hall

In honor of tank-top Fridays, we all sported tanks for our pathology final this morning (even our professor!! who escaped being photographed…)

• Cool thing I learned this week:  seeing as how I relearned 1000 things this week and learned another 1000 things that I didn’t learn the first time, there are so many things I could put here.  But one of the most interesting things I learned was all the effects of alcohol on the liver.  Sure, we all know it causes fatty liver and then cirrhosis in alcoholics, but do you know why?

1.  Metabolism of alcohol leads to a buildup of NADH+ which is used in oxidative phosphorylation to make ATP.  This NADH+                        is also used to convert DHAP (the useable intermediate in glycolysis (which happens before ox-phos)) to G3P (an unusable for glycolysis intermediate), which is the glycerol backbone for making triglycerides.

2.  The more alcohol and sugar you take in, the more DHAP you make, and therefore the more glycerol you make.

3.  Acetyl CoA is the end product of alcohol metabolism, and it is the precursor to making fatty acids (which can be added to                         glycerol to make triglycerides).  So you drink more alcohol, you have more substrate.

4.  Alcohol activates hormone-sensitive lipase which mobilizes fatty acids from the triglycerides stored in your adipose                                    tissue.  So you drink more, you put more fatty acids into your blood which can also go to the liver and accumulate with the                            other fatty acids.

5.  Alcohol inhibits mitochondrial function.  Guess what happens in the mitochondria.  Beta-oxidation of fatty acids (breakdown for energy).  So you drink more, you breakdown less fat and keep it around in your liver.

6.  Let’s recap.  Alcohol increases glycerol backbone synthesis and fatty acid synthesis = triglyceride formation.  Alcohol mobilizes fatty acids from your fat to your liver and prevents their breakdown = some of the fat you already had is now in your liver as well. EQUALS FATTY LIVER WHICH IS NOT GOOD.

So moral of the story, everything in moderation.  Because you can bet that on May 22nd after boards, I will be going to Harry’s Chocolate Shop again to have a Colorado Root Beer.  Or two.  Or three.  But definitely not every day, because fatty liver is a very preventable and unfortunate consequence of overindulgence and addiction =(  Somewhere I was reading that alcohol complicates up to 20% of hospital admissions in the US.  20%!!!!!!!!!!  I definitely understand why it can be a powerful and seemingly harmless addiction at first, but just like obesity and diabetes and meth, uncontrolled alcohol use can complicate so many things in your body.

• Back on a happier note, Spanish phrase of the day: ¿Tiene algún hábito como beber alcohol? = Do you have any habits like drinking alcohol?  Wait, guess that wasn’t necessarily happier…
• Tip for success in medical school: Books are WONDERFUL.  All kinds of books.  Reading books for pleasure is a fantastic break for your mind.  But reading books in medical school is great.  Our medicine professor has deemed Nimisha, Jeremy and I, “the world’s greatest study group,” and although we certainly don’t deserve that title, we are ALWAYS studying together, which makes life waaaayyyy more enjoyable, and also way more successful.  And at any given time we have about six books open.  We’ve been watching Doctors in Training (board prep) videos on the big screen at school, and pausing it sometimes to look in the book that came with it, our First Aid, Goljan Pathology, Robbins pathology and the internet when we don’t even know where to look.  I know Jeremy learns best in lecture, but even he uses a ton of books.  In undergrad, books were useful for a few classes and totally unnecessary for most, but in medical school books are amazing.  And the cool thing about Lafayette?  Almost every book you would ever need is in your classroom at all hours of the day.  So I only have to buy the major books and then study at school to use the rest =)

Well, it’s starting. The next month is going to be, forgive me, CRAY-CRAY. I’m only two days into studying for finals and realizing that this is going to be my life for the next four weeks…studying 10-12 hours a day for finals/boards.  Not really sure how I’m going to do it, but wow.  There is SO MUCH to review.  Sometimes I wonder how I can fit all of this into my head.  Can I really be a doctor??  But it is really cool when I can finally remember certain things and make connections between the physiology, pathology and pharmacology.

And I just now realized that I never wrote about Doctor’s Day!!  It was on April 4th at the Lafayette Country Club.  I volunteered to set it up this year and it was a lovely evening where about 20 or so local doctors and all the med students got together and talked about anything and everything.  It was set up like speed dating where the doctors were seated at tables according to specialty and every 15 minutes students moved around to different tables.  We got to pick which specialties we got exposure to and in my conversations I talked about the daily life of certain specialties, the state of healthcare in America and the opportunities outside of the doctor’s office that are available to MDs.  There were appetizers and desserts and it was a really nice break from schoolwork.  It’s super fun to get to do things sometimes that remind you of where you are going and gets your face out of a book or away from a computer screen.

Other than that not too many exciting things have been happening around Lafayette.  Grand Prix was last weekend and I was able to partake in a few activities including Breakfast Club, but unfortunately we had our last two section exams on Monday so I spent a good portion of the weekend at school.  All our intramural teams have wrapped up our seasons.  I’m so proud of  my Trigeminal Trashers!!

• Cool thing I learned today: I finally remember all the strange coloring side effects from certain drugs.  Red man syndrome = vancomycin infused too quickly.  Gray man syndrome = amiodarone toxicity.  Gray baby syndrome = chloramphenicol in young babies who lack enough hepatic conjugating enzymes.
• Spanish phrase of the day: ¿Cuándo empezó la diarrea? = when did the diarrhea begin?  That’s a pretty important question.
• Key to success: I cannot stress the importance of exercise.  Even though we have our pharmacology shelf exam tomorrow, my friends and I were super excited it was Wednesday because that means pick-up soccer with the biomedical engineering graduate students.  Unfortunately it was storming, so we were pretty bummed.

Chemotherapeutics. Just one of the many sections we covered today =)

Well, it’s 1:05am on a… oh wait I guess it’s Thursday…well the title is misleading, but anyways it’s 1:05 in the morning and I am still awake for some reason.  I don’t have an exam or a presentation tomorrow, got two dermatology exams and a genetics presentation over Maple Syrup Urine Disease out of the way this week already, but I just got done studying for the day.  I have unfortunately been feeling a sort of senioritis the past few weeks, well more like months, but the past two nights I’ve found my passion for studying again.  Studying for boards is actually kind of fun sometimes (except for BIOCHEM yuck).  It’s nice to integrate EVERYTHING you’ve ever heard of and to think through practice questions and actually get some right.

Just now I went through STDs, and most of it was a review, but every time I review things I pick up a little bit more.  Like now I know how to laboratory-wise differentiate Neisseria meningitidis, which causes meningitis or septicemia, and Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which causes gonococcal urethritis, septic arthritis and keratoconjunctivitis.  They both look the same on gram stain and under a microscope (gram negative diplococci) but meningococcus ferments both maltose and glucose and gonococcus only ferments glucose on chocolate agar.

And now I understand why you can’t use a beta-lactam ( like penicillin) on Chlamydia, because it is one of the rare intracellular bacterial pathogens and doesn’t have a normal bacterial cell wall, so using a cell wall-inhibiting antibiotic won’t do anything.  Crazy how I think I know so much about microbiology and then I realize I never made these simple kinds of connections until the fourth/fifth/sixth time around.  But that’s ok!  That’s how medicine works (so I’m told).  You pretty much relearn everything you learned first and second years in third and fourth, and then you relearn all that you need during internship and then you relearn all of that during residency.  That’s fantastic because I’m clearly going to need it!!

On a more fun note, our center has been participating in a lot of intramurals.  We just finished our sand volleyball and dodgeball seasons with heartbreaking losses in the tournament.  We still have ultimate frisbee and soccer (we’re ranked 4th!) coming up soon.  Wish us luck!

Our men’s basketball team also WON THE GRADUATE SCHOOL LEAGUE TOURNAMENT!!  We had a huge turnout to watch the game and I got to walk on/dance on/ touch and seep in the glory of the Mackey Arena basketball court.  (I was a proud member of the Paint Crew for the two years I was a Purdue undergrad!)  Here’s a copy of what was in the SCOPE in case you didn’t get a chance to read it:

 IUSM-Lafayette wins intramural basketball championship

IU may not have advanced beyond the Sweet 16 in this year’s NCAA basketball championships, but the IU School of Medicine can still lay claim to one recent victory on the court.

Team LCME, a team of first- and second-year medical students from IUSM-Lafayette, is the champion of the 2012 Purdue Intramural Graduate, Faculty and Staff Championship for Basketball. The students were cheered to victory on March 8 in Mackey Arena by more than 35 IUSM-Lafayette faculty, staff and friends, including Gordon L. Coppoc, PhD, DVM, associate dean and director of IUSM-Lafayette.

This year’s team — Zahab Ahsan, Murad Arif, Jordan Merz, Drew Schmidt (Most Valuable Player), Chris Bodle, Paul Wilson, Cody Bearden and Enosh Kazem — will be honored with a plaque to be hung in the medical student lounge in Purdue’s Lynn Hall. The team also received bright yellow champion’s T-shirts for their game-winning success.

This is the second intermural basketball win in the past several years for medical students at IUSM-Lafayette, where amateur sports form an important part of the school experience for many fledgling doctors, including a chance to bond outside the classroom and relieve the stress of a demanding curriculum. In 2003, the IUSM-Lafayette class of 2006 also took their division’s intramural basketball championship, and in 2007, the class of 2009 snagged their title for intramural dodge ball.

Other intramural sports at Purdue in which IUSM-Lafayette students regularly participate include soccer, Frisbee, volleyball and flag football.

Lafayette Center for Medical Education for the win!!

Basketball champs in Mackey Arena!!

March weather was lamb both ways, thank heavens, but school is definitely not. Before Spring Break boards seemed so far away. Now they feel like they are tomorrow and I feel as though I’ve studied nothing….so hopefully I can get caught up this week!

Anyways, last week I went to see my mentor at the nephrology clinic. We saw the usual follow-up patients, as most come in twice a year for labwork analysis and medication/lifestyle changes. Sometimes we discuss going on dialysis or getting on a transplant list.
One of our patients was a lady with an acquired renal cyst. Unfortunately the servers were down and we couldn’t look at her imaging studies to rule out polycystic kidney disease (PKD). She was in her mid-60s and most of the time PKD presents in 30 or 40-somethings, so it was unlikely. But PKD carries a much worse prognosis as it affects many organs including the liver and can end in end-stage organ disease. Acquired renal cysts have an unknown mechanism and are usually pretty benign until they get very large or if they are caused by things like ischemia, and may eventually lead to renal failure.

We also had a patient who seemed in good general health on appearance, but he actually had coronary artery disease, previous MI, hypertension, mutiple stents and diabetes mellitus type II for 15 years.  He was on SIX medications for DM alone and had just started insulin, so hopefully he can get off some of the other drugs.  He was on both Byetta and Januvia, which act as incretins to increase insulin secretion from pancreatic beta-cells, decrease  glucagon spikes and delay gastric emptying.  I thought it was interesting that he would be on two antidiabetic drugs from the same class.  He was also on Metformin, glipiride, acarbose and just recently Lantus (long-acting insulin).  My guess is his pancreas has gone over the hump and is burnt out, so all the drugs that work in concert with insulin are no longer working because he has no insulin production.  He was having trouble getting on insulin because he is a truck driver with a CDL license.  I did not know that there were job contraindications for receiving drugs like insulin.  But because DM can cause loss of consciousness either by hyperglycemia or hypoglycemia with too much insulin, drivers who are dependent on insulin are generally considered unfit to hold a CDL license.  But our patient was recently approved, so we were very glad that he was able to get on insulin.

As for school, we just started dermatology and finished up neurology.  I don’t mind neurology, but it doesn’t especially excite me.  It’s my first rotation starting this summer, so we’ll see how that goes…  As for derm, it is SO CONFUSING. So much vocabulary to remember for describing lesions and by the end of the day they all look the same to me.  So this week might be tough…

• Cool thing I’ve learned over the past few weeks: Psychedelic drugs are extremely misunderstood by the general public (including myself until the past few weeks) and can actually be used safely and can be extremely beneficial in the treatment of psychiatric disease when used in a controlled setting and at therapeutic doses.  Hopefully these drugs will be tested further and accepted by the public in the next few years.
• Spanish word of the day:  alergias estacionales = seasonal allergies = AWFUL.
• Key to success: Start allergy medications before all the allergens pop out.  Studying while sleepy and asthmatic = NOT SUCCESSFUL.

Our class at a local high school teaching a unit on neurology complete with brain specimens, nerve conduction velocity tests and a whole lot more!

Sister Jack wearing her sweater my friends got me for my birthday!

I can’t believe I just finished my last spring break…so sad. I went home to the Fort and had a relaxing week with my family and friends. Last year I was studying for a biochem test and the physiology shelf exam. SO happy to be a second year!!
Now it’s time to study neurology and start studying for boards hard core. I’ve studied a bit here and there, but it’s time to get down to business! This week: interview with my classmate Jeremy and more adventures at the hospital.
Cheers!

It’s time for you to meet the one, the only Nimisha Bajaj (fondly known to me as Nims, and we are fondly known together as Bajajenhop). Here are a few Q’s I posed to her for you with her (summarized) answers.

• What is the best thing about being at the Lafayette campus?  “Sitting next to [Sarah]“.  Lafayette has a small class size, awesome professors, some of whom play soccer with us and check on you when you are sick, snack week (where one classmate a week brings in snacks for the whole crew) and class “food fests” (Christmas party, Ethnic Food Night Thanksgiving, etc.).
• Why do you want to be a doctor?  “I knew since I was five.  I love that it combines science and problem solving with relationship-building and direct patient care.”
• What are your goals?  “As a doctor?  Honestly, no idea.”  In life, be a doctor that patients can trust and will come to with all their problems.  I want to raise kids and also have some sort of impact on public health and my community.
• What are your extracurricular activities while in school?  Intramural sports and pickup soccer with graduate students and professors, MSC (Medical Student Council) Center Representative and Competency Liaison.
• What are your interests outside of school?  Fashion, cooking, cute things like Sister Jack, piano & music, impromptu dance parties, punning and making a song for everything.
• What is your advice to applicants?  “Enjoy undergrad.  Do things that make you happy even if they’re non-doctory because never again will you be able to have such diverse interests.”
• Have any life advice?  “Enjoy what you’re doing.  Enjoy the little things.  Make the most of everything.  Eat a cookie once in a while.  Do what you can to make your friends happy and you will be happy.”
• What are your favorite animals?  “Elephant. Done.”  Also, Sister Jack, Jackson (another classmate’s dog) and Colby Jack (a friend’s cat).  Basically only animals named Jack.
• Anything else you’d like to add?  “When you are in med school, it’s important to have good friends to get you through the hard times and to study with, but mostly to get you through the hard times.  Be nice, be good, learn for the sake of learning and enjoy yourself.  Eat your fruits and vegetables.”

Caramel apples!

Pumpkin Carving

Out to lunch with the classmates. Status of the hair and glasses looks like finals week!

IUSM St. Vitus Dance

I would first and foremost like to share an exciting milestone. This week I wrote my very first orders!!  My lovely mentor (here in Lafayette we, as second years, are each paired with a local doctor in the community that we get to work with each week throughout the year) asked me to do a history, physical, progress SOAP note, complete with assessment and plan and then let me write the orders.  It was pretty exciting.  I am terrified of next year, being thrown into the hospital with no idea what to do, so it was a good experience to follow through with a whole patient experience during normal rounds.

My mentor is a nephrologist, so I got to see a delightful 74yo male with chronic kidney failure who became dehydrated and had an acute kidney failure episode.  He had been in the hospital for a few days and was feeling a lot better, but his BUN and creatinine were still high, and his hematocrit and hemoglobin were extremely low. I suggested that we give him erythropoietin, not remembering that it takes about six weeks to take effect. My mentor suggested that we give him a unit of blood to see if that helped. I’ve learned through working with her that most patients with kidney issues develop anemia. The hormone that stimulates red blood cell maturation, erythropoietin, is also released by the kidney, so if the kidneys can’t make urine, they probably can’t make erythropoietin either. But even when I forget little things and don’t understand all the treatments, it is pretty gratifying and reassuring that I can look through a medication list and know what at least ¾ of the drugs are used for.

In other news, I also shadowed an ER doctor last weekend. The Lafayette campus has a really cool summer program where four students get to work in the ER all summer and practice their new skills and learn a ton of new skills and get paid for it! So several of my classmates have ER doc mentors, one of which I got to visit. I had only been in an emergency room once before when my friend sprained her ankle, so I really didn’t even know what an emergency room looked like.

Since I went on a weekend night, I got to see the drunk people come out. There is a wide spectrum of consciousness, and it can be either scary or very entertaining to see people who are either vomiting uncontrollably or completely out of it versus people who have no idea where they are and are cracking jokes and hitting on nurses. I learned that most of the time the ER staff needs only to give them fluids, anti-nausea medication and wait until they are sober enough to be taken home. However it can be difficult to determine whether or not they have had any trauma (especially head trauma) because they tend to be desensitized to pain, so patients often have to get potentially unnecessary imaging done to be sure.

Dr. Waller let me do the initial workup of two patients, one with an upper respiratory infection and another with an STD consult and intermittent cough. It was fun to try out my focused history and physical skills with real patients. It is amazing how quickly doctors can do a quick check-up on patients. Dr. Waller can look at someone’s ears for two seconds and see redness or drainage more clearly than I can see it looking at it for a whole minute.

The night was mostly fun and laid-back with a lot of viral infections and drunk people, but one case was pretty intense. A woman came in an ambulance after collapsing with seizure-like activity. She seemed to be doing alright when we initially talked to her, but when Dr. Waller asked her a mental status question her eyes glazed over and she went into stuttering fits that turned into coughing fits. At first it seemed as though she was dodging questions because she didn’t know the answers, but later it became clear that she was having partial seizures. Thirty minutes after she came in we were rushed back to her room as she had a tonic-clonic seizure. Everyone stayed calm as the nurse held her head on a pillow and Dr. Waller suctioned the vomit out of her mouth so that she wouldn’t aspirate. They gave her Ativan through an IV and the seizure subsided after a few minutes. Her CT came back clear, and she seemed to get better after the medication, so Dr. Waller suspected a benzodiazepine addiction, and the patient was transferred upstairs to be admitted.
It was a really interesting experience working at the ER. I’m not sure I would enjoy the fast-paced get-‘em-in, get-‘em-out mentality, but I would really like to go back soon to get more exposure.

• Cool thing I learned today: Ketamine, aka Special K, aka horse tranquilizer, is being used to experimentally treat depression.  It sounds like some sort of drug derivative could be used as an adjunct therapy to current anti-depressant therapies that take 5-6 weeks to take effect.  Ketamine works in a few HOURS to bring relief of depression symptoms.  http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/magazine/issues/summer07/articles/summer07pg13.html
• Medical Spanish word of the day: ¿Qué la pasa? = what’s going on? Useful when settling a patient in and finding out why they are there.
• Key to success: Always have an umbrella or a hood.  March 2nd? Hail and thunderstorms.  NOT COOL.

Well we just finished endocrine and have started GI = SO MANY HORMONES!! It’s a miracle any of us can stay sane with the crazy amounts of different things running around in our blood. We also have our first Genetics exam coming up, of which I feel quite ill-prepared. Pedigrees were simple at first. These people have this disease and these children don’t and only the males get it, etc. make it pretty easy to interpret. But then you throw in population genetics and risks of passing on mutant alleles and what’s the chance of this kid getting this disease or this female being a carrier and everything gets crazy!
Luckily my family has been visiting me over this month for my upcoming birthday, so there has been a bit of excitement in my life. My 22-month old niece told me she loves me today, but only after telling me she loved my “meow” first. Sister Jack is indeed probably way cooler than me…
I will post more interesting updates soon including introducing one of my very own classmates and talking about my mentorship here in Lafayette!

• Cool thing I learned today: Only in the GI tract do adenomas (benign tumors) turn into carcinomas (malignant tumors) in sequence.  Everywhere else in the body they are distinct entities and having adenomas generally does not put a person at increased risk of developing carcinomas.
• Medical Spanish word of the day:  me duele el estomago = my stomach hurts
• Key to success for the day: Stay engaged in your learning.  It can be extremely difficult to pay attention during class when it’s something monotonous or you didn’t get enough sleep the night (or week) before.  But if you are going to be in class, then you might as well pay attention, really think about what the professor is saying and ask questions.  Try to integrate learning from one class into another.  For instance, if we learned about the pathologies of the stomach and esophagus, when we are in Pharmacology learning about it the next day, I try to think back to the specific mechanisms of injury and why drugs work.  This process builds synapses!  I admit, I’m not great at staying engaged day to day, but I am definitely improving all the time.  In undergrad I used to have to do crossword puzzles during boring classes just to stay awake, but I’m trying to move away from that and really concentrate.  Try it! It works! =)

This post is for Aaron C. who commented a looonnnngggggggg time ago. (Sorry!)  Thanks for the comment and I hope this is helpful!

1.  Have fun and be an undergrad.  The most important thing to remember is that you are first and foremost an undergraduate student.  College is a time for growing in every facet of your life, obviously getting ready for a career path but also for growing up and learning about yourself, yada yada, etc.  But it’s super true.  It’s really easy to get caught up in one or two aspects of your life during college because you feel like there are so many things you want to do, both fun and really unfun, but make sure you make time for both working hard and playing hard.  I was involved in a lot of things, but Friday and Saturday nights were for friends and I rarely missed a Purdue football or basketball game.
2. Explore everything.  The best way to figure out if you want to really be a doctor or health professional is to explore and try out everything.  Make sure you enjoy science.  Make sure you enjoy people.  Make sure you enjoy learning about anything and everything.  So many things go into being a great doctor and you want to make sure that you aren’t going to make yourself crazy if it isn’t for you.
3. Shadow.  I took a class at the University of Indianapolis where I essentially shadowed six or seven different doctors and wrote about and reflected on the process of being a doctor, and it really helped me solidify my interest in medicine.  But it wasn’t until I went overseas to Nicaragua and Honduras where I saw other doctors in action where I decided that’s for sure what I wanted to do.  Don’t make shadowing a crazy everyday experience, but make sure to see a few different areas of medicine to both see if you like it and get excited about all the cool things in medicine!  And don’t just shadow docs, shadow other things as well.  Your experiences may lead you down a different, but more exciting-for-you path, or they might reinforce your desire to be a doctor above anything else!
4. Get involved.  The best advice I can give is to pick a few things that you are super interested in and get involved in them during undergrad.  They can (and should be) both medicinally related and non-medicine related.  At Purdue I was involved in a medical organization called Raising AIM (Awareness of International Medicine), but I was also involved in Tomahawk, a service and leadership honorary that was involved in sports and extracurricular activities throughout Purdue.  I was a member of the Purdue Run Club, Purdue Swing Club and played on 10 or so intramural teams.  While I was at UIndy I ran cross country and track and was in the Pre-Physical Therapy Club.  I was always busy, but it was never just with school, which made undergrad incredibly fun and worthy of my time.  You can pick absolutely anything you are interested in, but don’t pick too much or you will go crazy and not be actually involved in anything.  There were a lot of things that sounded like fun, and I went to a lot of callouts and meetings just to try things out.  I picked the handful of activities that were most meaningful to me.
5. Be well rounded.  I graduated with my B.S. in Biology, but when I could I took classes outside of bio and chemistry.  Some of my favorite classes were the Art and Science of Dreams and an International Relations course that I took.  One of my classmates took multiple classes in Shakespearean literature.  One of my classmates was a Linguistics major.  Concentrate on your prereqs and if you generally love science, then take mostly science classes,  but undergrad is most likely the only time you’ll get to take some of those fun and interesting courses.